On May 16, 2007, at 8:28 AM, Russell Grinker wrote:
> Could it be because they failed to invest sufficiently to redesign and
> retool and stay abreast of the hungrier foreign competition,
> producing only
> what someone once called "40 foot behemoths with kiddie-car breaks and
> rubber- band suspension"? Isn't this sort of thing your area Doug?
> Why did
> they fail to innovate?
Yeah, the first part of what you say is true, but why did they fail so badly? I don't know the answer to this. They failed to "March! March!," as Marx put it in that famous passage from Wage Labor and Capital.* I"m tempted by some cultural explanation about the erosion of manufacturing skills in our embrace of the post-industrial. But in every interview with auto execs I've seen they come off as meatheads.
Doug
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*We thus see how the method of production and the means of production are constantly enlarged, revolutionized, how division of labor necessarily draws after it greater division of labor, the employment of machinery greater employment of machinery, work upon a large scale work upon a still greater scale. This is the law that continually throws capitalist production out of its old ruts and compels capital to strain ever more the productive forces of labor for the very reason that it has already strained them – the law that grants it no respite, and constantly shouts in its ear: March! march!